The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper - Gabrielle Hoseinhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/byline-authors/gabrielle-hosein
enOh for somewhere to feel safe...http://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-03-19/oh-somewhere-feel-safe
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_138.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>I got home very late from work and ready to collapse only to find the bed under a low-hanging, tent-like sheet, apparently making a ‘fort’.</p>
<p>I deliberated whether, out of sheer nostalgia and love, to shuffle underneath for a night of claustrophobic, but cuddly sleep (the kind where there’s always a small, brown limb thrown across one’s neck), leaving the sheet at its angle about a foot from my head. Or, whether to take it down because, while there was space for her, she being the size of Donkey to Shrek (me being Shrek), at least I wouldn’t die of suffocation while she sleeps peacefully and would be alive and breathing enough to risk her seven-year-old disappointment in the morning.</p>
<p>There are few adults who didn’t build “forts” of some kind growing up. Obliging parents let us take sofa cushions, lean them against each other in squares and then spread sheets across, with the greatest of joys being crawling under there with books, toys, a flash light, friends or siblings and those Chinese shrimp chips that expand when fried and taste like childhood bliss.</p>
<p>Childhood has changed. No children I know still play “elastic”, and those worldly girls of today look like you are describing a rotary dial phone, a wholly foreign thing none of them have seen, when you ask.</p>
<p>Yet, there are some things that remain consistent and, unfortunately, one of them is bullying. Still, we now think about it differently from before, and can help children grow into kinder, gentler human beings than we are, perhaps creating a more golden experience of growing up than what nostalgia allows us to recollect.</p>
<p>If you want to get a picture of what bullying looks like, at least in secondary schools, look up The Silver Lining Foundation’s just released Trinidad and Tobago School Climate Report on Bullying and Gender-Based Violence in Secondary Schools. Overseen by a team of young researchers and activists, 651 students from 20 schools were surveyed, with the majority of respondents being 13-16 years old.</p>
<p>The study is nationally generalisable so note that in the three months prior to the survey: 73 per cent of students indicated they had been teased or harassed at least once; 24 per cent indicated that they had been pushed or hit at least once; 40 per cent indicated that their belongings were stolen or damaged, 29 per cent were victims of sexually explicit taunts or advances; and 28 per cent reported being inappropriately touched by another. Primarily, appearance, ability and sexual orientation and gender expression were the most common causes of verbal teasing, harassment or intimidation.</p>
<p>What was just as disturbing was that these numbers were matched by students indicating that they had actively participated in teasing, harassment, stealing, pushing or hitting, threatening and sexual aggression. Boys were more likely to engage in bullying than girls, but also experienced verbal and physical bullying at slightly higher rates than girls who experienced greater sexual and cyber bullying. Boys’ experiences centred around attacks on their masculinity which targeted their sexuality or gender expression, and LBGT students experienced bullying at higher rates than others.</p>
<p>Significantly, 63 per cent of students never or rarely reported incidents of bullying because they didn’t want to be seen as tell-tales, did not trust teachers, did not want bullying by teachers or peers to worsen, or reported and felt too little was done.</p>
<p>Now think back to children’s familiar instinct for creating “forts” as part of play or over their bed. Their desire to construct safe spaces, whether from cushions at home or in terms of relationships with family, teachers and peers, continues as they grow into adolescence. Without options for feeling sheltered, and because bullying still exists, vulnerability can easily outweigh young bliss.</p>
<p>I stood tiredly at the bedroom door, my shadow crossing the sloping sheet, thinking of the dream that children could both feel and be safe. You understand now why I decided to leave her “fort” in place.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 19 Mar 2018 04:36:54 +0000alexk142290 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinBeware of hijacking by classhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-03-12/beware-hijacking-class
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_137.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Class has always been an issue in the women’s movement. Crossing class divisions among women and empowering working class women to have the pick-up-the-phone power of wealthy businessmen, remain the challenge today.</p>
<p>This, despite organisations such as Women Working for Social Progress (Working Women) with an explicit politics of working class women’s empowerment since the 1980s.</p>
<p>Media wished us all “Happy International Women’s Day” on Thursday. I reflected on whether I’d prefer being wished a “powerful” or “fearless” IWD, instead of “happy”.</p>
<p>“Happy” doesn’t require acknowledging how much more people need to contribute to changes to our ecological and economic decision-making, corruption, social services, transportation options and gang violence, which is what women really want. Happy isn’t a statement of commitment or solidarity, it’s a celebration, which is cool, but it’s apolitical, which is not.</p>
<p>This day was born from garment women workers’ public and unapologetic protests for better wages and working conditions, and from socialist women’s struggles in relation to class inequities in the economy and politics, women’s unequal responsibility for care work, violence and more.</p>
<p>Radio hosts, particularly male ones who dominate the talk show terrain, discussed IWD, often combining progressive positions on consent, violence and women’s leadership with stereotypical and problematic block talk on women’s “natural” characteristics, lesbianism and abortion.</p>
<p>The slew of activities that filled last week spoke to a growing national will to see respect, honour and safety as part of women’s rights. This is a success that has taken 110 years of blood, sweat and tears globally.</p>
<p>In the present, many months go into planning activities so that women get direct access to political leadership or so that it’s the women from rural South and Cashew Gardens whose work is amplified or so that men are called on to be vocal and visible allies.</p>
<p>In addition, IWD cocktails and fashion shows, and sisterhood with Proseco events, pop up; some very last minute and some quite costly, as if IWD is trending or another all-inclusive or about etiquette or a day which women should pay to access.</p>
<p>Rather, IWD is built on long-term and even year-round commitment to transforming a world in which women do not yet have full human rights, choice and freedoms in conditions of their choosing.</p>
<p>While there is joy in gathering over food and drinks, there is a risk when the costs separate women rather than bringing them together. Finally, when events appear a week before on the calendar, as if it only just occurred to the organisers, it makes you wonder if they took the time to find out what the long term work, and collaboration with and support to that, could have helped accomplish instead of another separate event. </p>
<p>Yet, so many events last week democratise a feminist dream in a way that makes sense to different women wherever they are. Amidst this, professional women and those of wealth and means should be aware of gathering to celebrate sisterhood, but without sisters lacking wealth, professional status and networks.</p>
<p>I thought about this while putting on a good jacket to talk to women leaders and managers about a private sector approach to addressing intimate partner violence.</p>
<p>I also thought about it while reflecting on my own political goals to provide ways for women of all classes to participate in IWD, whether by cutting out an IWD poster printed on March 8 in the newspaper and making sure its up in the store where they work or the office where they clean; or by freely sharing all the #speakyourtruth and #caribbeanmencan messages created for Facebook and Instagram; or by marching as a nation of women and girls gathering across differences of class, age, ethnicity, sexuality, geography and ability.</p>
<p>As commemoration of IWD expands, let’s remember its history is not just about celebration, but affirming how we can put our power to empowering women still needing and pursuing what others have achieved.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 12 Mar 2018 04:16:27 +0000alexk142017 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinSpeak your truth!http://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-03-05/speak-your-truth
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_135.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Women, this week, speak your truth.<br />
March through Port-of-Spain on Thursday, March 8, at noon, continuing a 60-year tradition started first by Christina Lewis in San Fernando. Rally from Whitehall and around the Savannah on Saturday, March 10, at 3 pm with others painting posters, T-shirts and banners, and highlighting the challenges of women’s realities and our demands for long-due women’s rights.</p>
<p>Gather with your male allies to build movements, sisterhood and safe spaces around women’s issues and their solutions.</p>
<p>And, if you cannot be there, know that we have not forgotten you.</p>
<p>Maybe you’re a grandmother looking after grandchildren whose parents are incarcerated, managing just enough for passage to school and food. You’re an institutionalised woman or girl, the majority of whom have experienced childhood abuse and may now be deeply missing potential for healing.</p>
<p>You’re on your feet six days a week in retail stores in Tunapuna, High Street and Chaguanas Main Road, and the low wages and long hours mean you’re conserving your energy and money for waged work, work at home and managing another week. You’re the daughter primarily responsible for care of your aged or unwell parents, and leave them more than you have to.</p>
<p>Your husband has been laid off or one of the hundreds killed by gun violence, and you’re in the kitchen after work and on weekends catering to make ends meet. You’re in treatment for cancer, but without enough strength to walk.</p>
<p>You’re one of tens of thousands of women living with intimate partner violence in the last decade, and you experience body pains, lack of confidence and an inability to concentrate, and it just feels too much to do one more thing in public. Maybe the bruises or the threats against your life are so bad, you’re unwilling to leave wherever you are now safe.</p>
<p>You’re on shift in the police force, in the army, at KFC or as a domestic worker in someone’s home. You are cleaning your temple, church or mosque as part of women’s work, keeping you away from organising to advance struggles solely in your name.</p>
<p>The struggle for women’s rights is founded on common truths. Right here, on average, right here, men make about $15,000 more than women per month. National-level prevention programmes and a coherent state strategic plan to end gender based violence do not exist. Girls’ rates of HIV infection, child sexual abuse, teenage parenthood and economic insecurity remain higher that boys. These are real harms, negotiated with great risk and backlash. Still, girls and women dust off and cope, survive and improve.</p>
<p>If you can’t gather, open up to your neighbour, your trusted religious elder, or your partner, so that hearing compels them to turn empathy to solidarity. Tell your co-workers, your boss, your support group so that they can commemorate your resilience.</p>
<p>However, you can, press for gender justice, for a national gender policy, sexual harassment legislation, better services for trauma victims, ratification of ILO Convention189, and an end to corruption that steals from our children’s mouths and backpacks, and from their very dreams for a better future.</p>
<p>Visit the Facebook page, International Women’s Day Trinidad and Tobago, for a list of events meant to educate and empower. Whether you march or you finally leave or you speak up for yourself or you break a long held silence or you celebrate another day that you grow strong, stand up, speak up, get up.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Mar 2018 04:06:42 +0000alexk141747 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinStumped, stopped in my trackshttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-02-26/stumped-stopped-my-tracks
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_134.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Zi came home from school with minor injuries. A boy had pushed her down making her bleed from her knee. Another day, one kicked her in the neck, somehow, and it hurt her for a week. Next time, a third hit her in the eye. The physical violence wasn’t purposeful, the boys were being wild. But I wondered if there was a later lesson, that men can behave how they choose and women must learn to manage their own safety or risk injury.</p>
<p>The fact of “boys being boys” as the denominator of social rules isn’t good enough when spaces are shared. One of the boys was also calling her and other children names. I said she should tell him not to call her names, she doesn’t like it and to stop. She said, he wouldn’t listen and would anyway. I said tell the other boys that they have to make sure how they want to behave doesn’t hurt others, including her. She said they wouldn’t care. I said, tell your teachers. She said, they just say, don’t worry about it and go play somewhere else, so she stopped saying anything.</p>
<p>Is this how gender-based violence becomes familiar, when girls realise that they cannot state their right to not be insulted or injured and have it heard, thus changing boys’ behaviour? When there is impunity and lack of accountability about respect and safety in shared spaces, raising these realities gets read as advocating the feminisation of childhood, but something else is at stake when girls learn to stay silent and be more careful.</p>
<p>Zi wasn’t prepared to press her point or fight back, risking further rough play to defend her terms, so she experienced a moment of socialisation about silence, inability to change the conditions she experiences, and responsibility for her safety. Sound familiar? I began thinking about what she’d need to be able to state her fair needs and rights as a basis for autonomy, sovereignty and empowerment.</p>
<p>I thought about continued government failure to implement gender-based violence programmes in schools or preventative programmes in social life. Global literature will tell you that gender ideologies—our beliefs and values about manhood and womanhood, their roles, and their right to different forms and expressions of power—is at the heart of violence against women.</p>
<p>Other factors, whether interpersonal conflict, substance abuse, economic insecurity and infidelity, are triggers, and sometimes consequences, but not the cause. A country that takes such violence seriously would systematically transform our gender ideologies, giving girls greater practice stating the terms of their relationships with others, and refusing verbal or physical violence and harm.</p>
<p>People think women are too empowered or have “too much equality”, but the numbers of applications for protection orders, the deaths from intimate partner violence, and rates of sexual violence against girls and women tell a totally different story.</p>
<p>Religious messages are those most pervasive and least likely to emphasise the legitimacy of women having full sovereign power over their own bodies, sexuality and reproduction. Pastoral care often reminds women of the sanctity of marriage to men, the need to respect husbands as authority figures, and the necessity of sacrifice for peace in the family.</p>
<p>Male violence is backed by surprisingly common ideas that women don’t have the right to decide when the relationship is done and should peacefully co-operate with practices of male culture and control.</p>
<p>Do girls have the right to state what they want and how they want to be treated, and to have that respected? Do they have the right to say no to insult or aggression? When do they get to practice the skills they need to stop any experiences of violence?</p>
<p>Neither state nor society takes preventative programmes seriously enough to stop violence against women. Seeing those moments of gender socialisation that don’t help either stops all my public activism in its tracks and makes me wonder.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 26 Feb 2018 05:11:03 +0000alexk141479 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinWhen it hits, you feel no painhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/news/2018-02-19/when-it-hits-you-feel-no-pain
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_133.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Minshall mas was an iconic meeting of national colours, the red confined to the band’s massive banners while all else was the white of sailor mas combined with deep blackness of God’s omniscient eye.</p>
<p>Who knew that white and black pared down to absolute essentials could feel so epic in a sea of multi-colour? Who knew a Burroquite, derived from the Spanish word burroquito, could play an immortal, winged creature from Greek mythology, as if the little donkey of traditional mas could aspire to be a stallion, like Aldrick and his dragon, just to cross the stage?</p>
<p>Hurrying from a fete to the Savannah to see Exodus competing at pan finals with moko jumbies and Minshall’s banners hovering overhead, I thought about the headiness of the stage.</p>
<p>Hard to define, but like music, when its vortex envelopes you and that wind coming down from the Northern Range hits your skin, it’s like you feel no pain.</p>
<p>If you don’t play Carnival, you don’t realise how much beauty there is to miss.</p>
<p>The heart of the moment remains with traditional mas and with small brilliantly creative bands. Like with pan, our best cultural values are practiced in traditional mas making, their outcomes worn on the body like sacred thread.</p>
<p>Mas making involves intense commitment to long hours of hard work, community-building and collective happiness.</p>
<p>It involves grounded theorising as highfalutin as anything found in a museum, and political clap back through direct satire or alternate envisioning for nation, history, ecology and dignity.</p>
<p>It involves immense skill. You might think the same thing is being repeated every year and fail to see the nuanced experiments with weight, beadwork, painting, colour, rope-making, wire and cloth that characterise a lifetime of work with art.</p>
<p>Besides sacred threads, the high mass of jouvay brought its ethereal bliss right when the sun begins to rise over the hills and your pores raise with indescribable gratitude that religious orthodoxy doesn’t have a stranglehold on all that is holy, for the separation between the sacred and profane is merely one form of social order, and it’s possible to feel fully alive and free and God-given while dutty and in old clothes and keenly aware of how much of the world is a hell we should turn upside down.</p>
<p>So much is going on as you move through town, you can see how Lovelace couldn’t limit himself to short sentences for a spirit seems to fill the streets like words jumbieing a full stop.</p>
<p>With 3Canal, and against the backdrop of the Laventille Rhythm Section, there’s a haute couture that you’ll never see on any Vogue runway.</p>
<p>People paint, weave and sew masks, veils, jackets, dresses, headdresses and produce home-made devil horns of every beautiful kind. Someday someone’s going to build a career on documenting the specific aesthetic of jouvay high fashion.</p>
<p>As he does every year, Stone made me a standard, this time with the Eye of God, to play a Monday mas, to ironically position it watching police as they watched me, and to remind that mas doesn’t have to be a big production. Just a bamboo stick, box for cardboard and some paint.</p>
<p>Review of the road this year must mention the power of messaging about a culture of consent. I saw the women of Womantra with their signs.</p>
<p>I saw a renegotiation of body politics and permission, significant considering how many men come to town “for woman.” I watched “Bishops’ girls,” sing their school song, now as hardback, jamette-style flag women. Profound shifts everywhere.</p>
<p>Finally, Ziya’s calypso competition song, which earned second place, “Pencil cases in the air!” gave Stone and I chance to experiment; going full Iwer, throwing in a Destra-style bridge and adding memorable hooks for school children everywhere. Calypso will only survive if people can’t stop singing its refrain. Tents may be dying, but in children, calypso traditions may rise again.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 19 Feb 2018 04:50:10 +0000alexk141233 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinDJ in the Househttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-02-12/dj-house
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_132.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Typical of Carnival for every one of her seven years, Ziya has been falling asleep hearing soca on loop through day and night, as loud as the chorus of crickets, frogs and barking dogs outside, but drifting through and from under the studio door across the hall.</p>
<p>Before roadmixes hit airwaves and all-inclusives, she’s heard them produced from beginning to end; the experiments with hooks, cowbells and synths, and their ability to add dramatic crescendo, breaks and pace.</p>
<p>For weeks, she’d been going to sleep with “hello”, “hello”, “hello” on repeat. This past week, it was “start”, “start”, “start”, rolling over added drums and vocals.</p>
<p>I’m thinking of the unlikely soundtracks to her childhood memories and how she’s inherited an experience I’ve had for almost half my life.</p>
<p>Stone began to invent Carnival roadmixes twenty years ago, before producers started regularly sending a tune for something extra and more extended than needed for fetes and radio.</p>
<p>I’d go to sleep while he moved coloured lines and bars around on a computer screen, fixing vocals, pulling out buried horns, sweeps and strums, and re-arranging pan notes.</p>
<p>Turning over in the night, I’d hear a section of sound being moved back and forth, back and forth, as he edited songs the way a DJ would, with breathing space for smooth openings and endings that could cut and mix.</p>
<p>Meeting other producers, remixers and DJs, I wanted to write a book about these men working from home, so different from the women’s home-based labour documented in scholarship and in poems about Caribbean mothers working as seamstresses, cake-makers or weavers while children played about them.</p>
<p>Did men working from home have the same experiences? Did they do as much care work while also earning income?</p>
<p>Was there a playpen in the studio for those times when they were on parental shift and on creative deadline?</p>
<p>Were they always “at work” ordid they plan times specifically for family? What was it like for their partners and children for men to be breadwinners at odd hours of the night and in their pyjamas?</p>
<p>Did music always pay the bills?</p>
<p>What could we learn about Caribbean masculinities and labour from these studio guys?</p>
<p>Stone’s own history in first editing tapes before transitioning to hardware such as cds, drives and computers, and then finally ending with software, tones and sample libraries, highlighted the technological shifts that enabled these home studios to impact Trinidad and Tobago’s musical sound. It made these a lens for tracing how globalisation’s wider shifts in knowledge, products and capital impact local culture even in small, near-equatorial soca kingdoms.</p>
<p>When we think technological shift, we think “Big Truck”, but it probably started with drum machines and four track tapes in these fellas’ teenage bedrooms and, later, in their home-based music studios, even more common today when all you need is a laptop and headphones.</p>
<p>The baby came and the book idea, titled DJ in the House, took second place, but I remembered it as Ziya began to dream to 2018 tracks not yet publicly released.</p>
<p>Between us, we had fallen asleep and woken up to various stages in official mixes for Kees, Destra, Rikki Jai, Machel, Sherwin, Dil e Nadan, Andre Tanker, Ultimate Rejects-MX Prime, Patrice, KMC, Trini Jacobs, Bunji, Faye-Ann, David Rudder, Treason, Alison Hinds, Mr Vegas, Chinese Laundry and even, now deceased, Rocking Randy.</p>
<p>She has more of a subconscious sense of the “cutting floor” or final cut, a reference to unimaginably obsolete days of splicing thin reels of tape, than most of the nation dancing to versions that appear effortless, rather than debated and negotiated.</p>
<p>From today, extended road mixes rule the road. Thinking about their production, and not just consumption, you’d be surprised who could tell us their backstory.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 12 Feb 2018 04:33:54 +0000alexk140983 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinJustice for Yugge!http://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-02-05/justice-yugge
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_131.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>There are some ways of wielding power that should end a political dynasty, for they are so cynical, manipulative and unethical that collective disgust should rise up with toppling momentum. The injustice experienced by 22-year-old Yugge Farrell in St Vincent and the Grenadines is a blatant example of such advantageousness in our midst, and we should not let it occur without consequences.</p>
<p>Yugge was charged for using abusive language to Karen Duncan-Gonsalves, wife of Minister of Finance Camillo Gonsalves, daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, and Senior Crown Counsel in the Attorney General’s office. After Yugge pleaded not guilty, the prosecutor requested that she be sent to a psychiatric facility for evaluation. The magistrate agreed—without any evidence of mental health issues presented—to justify court-ordered evaluation and confinement. Indeed, if Yugge’s mental health were an issue, the charge and court process should not have proceeded as it did in the first place.</p>
<p>Yugge spent three weeks in a mental health centre. According to newspapers reports, she was administered a cocktail of medication outside of the court order and against her will, without proper or independent evaluation, without trained psychiatrists on staff, and despite the fact that the Mental Health Act only speaks to observation and evaluation and not to involuntary admission and treatment.</p>
<p>The St Vincent and Grenadines Human Rights Association, a petition hosted online by Code Red for Gender Justice and continuing to be signed by hundreds across the region, and a collective statement created by Womantra in Trinidad and Tobago, all point to misuse of political power, questionable judicial process and integrity, and human rights violation in this situation.</p>
<p>The petition asks whether commitment to a mental institution for use of insulting language is a regular occurrence or, instead, irresponsible and heavy-handed state force. Yugge has publicly claimed she was in a romantic relationship with Minister Gonsalves up to 2016, but as the petition points out, “state entities can easily use the excuse of mental instability to vilify, discredit and institutionalise any critic or person(s) deemed a threat or embarrassment to the established political order”.</p>
<p>Regional calls are therefore for a formal investigation into the decision to detain and medicate Yugge Farrell, an immediate review of the Mental Health Act in St Vincent and the Grenadines, the dropping of all charges, and public resistance to such state persecution to silence truth.</p>
<p>Shockingly, Prime Minister and Minister of Legal Affairs Ralph Gonsalves, despite his clear conflict of interest in protecting his political heir, has been brazenly commenting on the case in media. On January 24, SVG’s iWitness News described him as arguing that “a magistrate can decide to commit someone to the psychiatric hospital based on information that the prosecutor gives the magistrate outside of the court proceedings and which is not disclosed to either the defendant or to their lawyer”.</p>
<p>Ralph Gonsalves is no neutral bystander here. What we are seeing in St Vincent and the Grenadines is another cover-up strategy to hide impropriety by powerful men in government.</p>
<p>As Leave out Violence in SVG (LOVNSVG), a group which focuses on gender-based violence and violence against women has put it, “Yugge’s story highlights the subjection of the poor and those on the margins to the whims and fancies of the political elite and ruling class”.</p>
<p>If the region had not been horrified and acted in solidarity, Yugge’s experience and confinement may have passed with impunity. Now that Yugge has been released on bail, her defence, protection and wellness are priorities. Additionally, as Womantra put it, we are “closely watching the further conduct of this case and stand ready to speak out against the slightest hint of malfeasance by any agent of the state”.</p>
<p>Find and sign the petition on the Code Red for Gender Justice webpage. Support the fundraising campaign for Yugge at: <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/justiceforyugge">https://www.gofundme.com/justiceforyugge</a>.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 05 Feb 2018 05:15:50 +0000alexk140701 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinChampagne and mauby in this soca kingdomhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-01-29/champagne-and-mauby-soca-kingdom
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_130.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Last year’s politically-astute megahit touched a deep chord in people’s spinal cord. Ultimate Rejects-MX Prime’s Full Extreme brilliantly called out the disaster that is Port-of-Spain’s governance of the nation’s treasury and economy. It also celebrated the popular necessity of taking jammin, giving jammin, and jammin still, which is the only way to endure hardship, hold on to an ideal of fulfilment, and experience enough bodily exuberance, however fleeting, to lift the spirit.</p>
<p>What to do in the midst of a recession that, as Terrence Farrell tells us, the government refuses to fix? Doh business; a piece of advice as complex as any proverb or framed verse of Desiderata, rephrased in the grammar of soca.</p>
<p>One year, thousands of lay-offs and hundreds of dead bodies later, we need another refrain to carry us collectively through this season. 2018 Carnival’s expected Road March, Soca Kingdom, brings the success of Machel’s signature hard pong and invokes the obeah of SuperBlue, but provides few of the political layers of last year.</p>
<p>The Boy King offers bare description of “wining all in front of the people business place”. There will be wining and it will occur in front of locked and shuttered business places, but there’s no comparable “kaiso, kaiso!” in this line’s lyrical imagining of the dream and dread of sovereignty over our twin-island domain.</p>
<p>Lloyd Best is in my head as I think about this, with his view that none of us yet consider ourselves the owners in this place. Rather, we all understand ourselves as workers and second-class citizens; mere proletarians without capital to be in charge.</p>
<p>You only “party like a VIP” if you are not partying as a VIP. If, indeed, you not a VIP. You only wining in front of “the people” business place if those people are others and not you.</p>
<p>I suppose, on reflection, rather than normalising classist barricades which have invaded fete spaces over the past decade with VVIP sections promising champagne in mauby times, Machel’s instruction actually names the paltry and narrowed terms of our social contract, and distribution of wealth and power in our political-economy.</p>
<p>An elite some get to be “the people”, an aspiring some get near enough to act “like”, and the rest must make the most of wining over countless road pothole, the most obvious and common symbol of how smartmen in a contractocracy become VVIP.</p>
<p>A major problem, any economist will tell you, is that business in Trinidad and Tobago is often dependent on state funds or on imports, and with oil and gas production and prices low, neither does the state have funds nor are we earning enough to sustain a model premised on imports, not even a Carnival model masquerading as local when premised on imports.</p>
<p>Back to champagne and mauby. The Trinidad and Tobago Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (TTEITI) released a report on our “new normal” in January, showing that we are spending more than we are earning, and it’s clear that the management of our resources, investments, earnings, and plans for sustainable revenue generation have been and continue to be poor.</p>
<p>So, unfortunately, when the wining is done, somebody is going to have to business about the people business place, which is the government and nation, and start business places that create rather than lay off jobs, bringing in rather than spending foreign exchange.</p>
<p>Otherwise, the biggest business in the place will be crime, and the gangs will run communities like they own them, murdering whomever they choose, which is how de facto sovereign power works when the social contract meant to protect the people’s business fails.</p>
<p>In this Soca Kingdom, we have to rule from inside, rather than being in front and locked out. To quote Growling Tiger, money is King, and we are set to find out if it’s really true, that when you are broken, a dog is better than you.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 29 Jan 2018 05:15:34 +0000alexk140422 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinGive me room to winehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-01-22/give-me-room-wine
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_129.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Carnival has always been about negotiation of gendered and sexual power. Think of jamettes’ long confrontation with middle-class and religious expectations of respectability. Think of a cross-dressing mas tradition long enabling performance of transgressive identities.</p>
<p>The charge has historically been directed at women “wining like that” with century after century of commentators repetitively raging about (women’s) vulgarity and the potential for bam bam to make all social order bend over.</p>
<p>Ignoring the hysteria of such emasculated morality, women increasingly came together in movements tens of thousands strong to declare a desire for sexual freedom and pleasure, and an expectation of state responsibility for protection of these, as “rights.”</p>
<p>Commentators who bemoaned Carnival’s loss of political punch completely misread decades of bikini mas because they were not the mouthpiece for Afro-Trinidadian working class men in the tradition of pan and calypso.</p>
<p>They missed the significance of year after year of multi-class and multi-ethnic bands of bubblicious women in agreement about such rights as a modern Caribbean feminist politics predating “Slutwalks,” “Life in Leggings” or “Me Too” responses to sexual harassment.</p>
<p>“Carnival is woman” on the one hand was about commodifying and marketing women’s bodies as the nation’s economic stimulus package, but on the other it marked a decisive shift to a contemporary social order in which jamette resistance had become fully nationalised.</p>
<p>TTPS’ public position on consent in Carnival is the jamette’s desire and right to sexual autonomy and freedom from sexual violence, both denied by the very foundations of colonial authority, now articulated by law.</p>
<p>It’s a historically significant signal of change and power not to be by-passed, a legacy of Carnival becoming woman, now penetrating into state authority.</p>
<p>It should stop anyone from declaring that Carnival is no longer political because the renegotiation of power in the democratic density of a ram fete or in the middle of rough wine on the road is politics itself, from rather than in “yuh pweffin.”</p>
<p>A debate with all expected hullabaloo followed the police press statement.</p>
<p>Iwer declared: “If you look at all the history about Carnival, we never had an issue with anybody wining on anyone.”</p>
<p>Not true.</p>
<p>Thousands of women can tell you about fellas not taking a “no” or a “move away,” others pulling your wrists or your waist when you on the road for Jouvay, needing to roll with a crew of fellas for protection, and playing mas within ropes and with security precisely to be free of being pursued and grabbed.</p>
<p>Fay-Ann’s concern was about the right to consent being abused by “a lot of women in the stations” falsely claiming a man tried to wine on them, though reports of sexual violence have never worked that way.</p>
<p>Machel was criticised for his instructions before his management instructed him to back back. The police were above the fray and dead clear.</p>
<p>It’s assault to touch someone without her or his consent.</p>
<p>Police Service Asst Supt Michael Jackman went further than advising permission to wine: “Even when a person is already engaged in dancing or wining or gyrating with another person, with a partner, a friend, family member or stranger, at some point in time that person says, ‘Okay, I want to stop’, and they indicate that verbally or by action, that action may be by stepping away or saying, ‘no’, verbally, ‘I had enough’, then the person who they were engaged with at that point in time ought to respect that decision and stop.”</p>
<p>In his statement were echoes of Explainer’s Rasta Chick, Singing Sandra’s Die with My Dignity, Destra’s Wrong Bam Bam and even Sharlene Boodram’s, Ask It.</p>
<p>Wining is an old jamette language now brilliantly informing interpretation of law by police brass.</p>
<p>The body talks, and the lesson is to become literate in woman-centred traditions of lyrical and waist skill, or dan is the man in the van on his way to make a jail.</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 22 Jan 2018 04:01:19 +0000alexk140139 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle HoseinMaking feminism more relevant to menhttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/columnist/2018-01-15/making-feminism-more-relevant-men
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Gabrielle%20Hosein_128.jpg" width="400" height="410" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Comandantas from Mexico’s Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) recently called for a global gathering of rebellious women. Their language reflected centuries of radical leadership of Indigenous women in the Caribbean.</p>
<p>“With regard to the Zapatista men,” they wrote, “we are going to put them to work on all the necessary tasks so that we can play, talk, sing, dance, recite poetry and engage in any other forms of art and culture that we want to share without embarrassment. The men will be in charge of all necessary kitchen and cleaning duties.”</p>
<p>Here at home, I had just had one of those conversations about how feminists should make our work more about men and more relevant to men, but no words were said about them manning the kitchens.</p>
<p>This pressure is ironic. In all its diversity, feminism is the only social movement in history to put women’s rights and their challenge to patriarchal power first, and it emerged specifically because other movements, from unions to political parties, aimed for merely halfway liberation, and still do.</p>
<p>The millions of women who are the majority labouring in feminism’s trenches must unapologetically prioritise women’s freedom from sexual violence and equity in political and economic power, both still to be won.</p>
<p>Yet, this movement has also been active on issues of peace, nuclear disarmament, trade agreements, gang violence, literacy, conservation and other areas which impact both women and men’s lives.</p>
<p>Additionally, feminists have long been active on “men’s issues” whether they are arguing for greater paternity leave, for greater care for boys’ emotions, prison reform and much more.</p>
<p>And, it’s worth noting that men’s violence against women and women’s under-representation in global and national decision-making are not “women’s issues.”</p>
<p>They are issues of men’s occupation and exercise of unequal power, and they should be solved by men with an iota of commitment to justice because that’s what manhood, in all its diversity, love and strengths, brings. Do we appeal to a majority of men by leaving traditional notions of manhood and womanhood unchallenged or by prioritising men’s needs, cleaving feminism’s radical vision and analytic challenge to precisely these from its mobilisation and power?</p>
<p>We know that’s not necessary because men all over the world are involved and doing great work in feminist movements without us even trying to “put men and boys more to the centre of our policy solutions”, or pretend there is anything equal in experiences of domestic violence, or that one woman President is enough when women have never been 50 per cent of our parliament.</p>
<p>These are brothers-in-struggle who don’t need women to exercise power behind the scenes, in the home, while rocking the cradle, or nicely because they know that commitment is about justice, not comfort, not a battle of the sexes, nor a decentering of women from feminism, even as we also care about our children, brothers, nation and planet.</p>
<p>In a final irony, marking feminist success by men’s visibility risks becoming vulnerable to those demanding newspaper space for gender—meaning only men—while failing to get definitions, facts or analysis right.</p>
<p>Because of word space, I won’t dust out those SFATT soundboys tonight.</p>
<p>We don’t get men on our side by softening, repackaging or marginalising accurate analyses of power, but because collective transformation of patriarchal ideals of manhood and womanhood, which ultimately harm both women and men, is necessary.</p>
<p>To quote these Zapatista Comandantas: “We greet you with respect and affection as the women that we are—women who struggle, resist and rebel against the chauvinist and patriarchal state.</p>
<p>“We know well that the bad system not only exploits, represses, robs and disrespects us as human beings, but that it exploits, represses, robs and disrespects us all over again as women…Yet we are not fearful, or if we are we control our fear, and we do not give in, we don’t give up, and we don’t sell out.”</p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 15 Jan 2018 05:13:10 +0000alexk139851 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttGabrielle Hosein